Woody Allen's jazz band plays in S.F. Wednesday

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Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 25, 2011

Photo: FlynetPictures.com 2008

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Woody Allen

Woody Allen

Photo: FlynetPictures.com 2008

Woody Allen's jazz band plays in S.F. Wednesday

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Woody Allen may be one of the most celebrated film directors on the planet, but playing old-fashioned New Orleans jazz of the type associated with pioneers of the 1920s such as King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet has been his avocation since even before he began making movies in the mid-1960s.

He's passionate about it, practices daily on his antique Albert System clarinet and performs every Monday night with his New Orleans Jazz Band at the posh Cafe Carlyle on New York's Upper East Side when he's not filming in Europe or making occasional tours with the septet.

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An obsession

He was "just about a teenager, 12 or 13," when he first saw soprano saxophonist and clarinetist Bechet performing in Paris. "I liked it a lot," Allen, 76, says by phone from his New York office. "Like every kid that age, when you start to get into something, whether it's batting averages or football players, you become obsessed with it. I started buying records and listening. That led to more records and books and reading about it. You know, it fed off itself. I bought myself a soprano saxophone and tried to learn it and then switched over to the clarinet."

"I found on a soprano saxophone you always try to sound like Sidney Bechet," he adds. "This was an impossibility; he was so beyond anything I could hope to play like. Unless you're a real genius like he was, it's not as good an instrument. The clarinet is a more interesting instrument, really. Again, if you're a fantastic musician like he was, then you could play anything and it sounds great, but for me, I need all the help I can get."

Allen saw Bechet play on three or four occasions but never got to know him. Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn did, however, name their two adopted daughters in the late musician's honor. One is "Bechet," the other "Manzie Tio," after Bechet drummer Manzie Johnson and Lorenzo Tio Jr., who had taught Bechet and other famous New Orleans musicians. "I thought it was a great name," Allen says of "Manzie."

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Some sources claim that Allen, who was born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, picked his stage name after that of clarinetist and bandleader Woody Herman. "That's completely false - nonsense," he states. "He certainly was not one of my favorites, although I did like him."

Broad musical interests

Allen's musical interests are much broader than the type of New Orleans traditional jazz he plays with his band, which will appear Wednesday at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco. According to banjo player Eddy Davis, musical director of Allen's New Orleans Jazz Band, legendary bebop pianist Bud Powell is his longtime friend's favorite of all musicians. "Woody likes to fiddle around on piano, too," Davis adds, "and on the piano he plays a lot of (Thelonious) Monk."

Audiences for traditional New Orleans-style jazz have shrunk drastically over the past quarter century. Allen's band, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band from New Orleans and the Jim Cullum Jazz Band from San Antonio are about the only three left that tour widely.

Further evidence of the decline of interest in the genre are albums by such New Orleans pioneers as Bunk Johnson and Kid Ory, and San Francisco revivalists such as Lu Watters and Turk Murphy that regularly turn up in dollar bins in used record stores.

Dying off

"It's been dying off for years," Davis, 71, says of interest in traditional jazz.

Berkeley resident Richard Hadlock, a Bechet disciple on both soprano sax and clarinet who was the San Francisco Examiner's jazz critic in the early '60s, concurs, but only to a degree. His weekly "The Annals of Jazz" program, which began on KJAZ in 1959, is currently broadcast at 7 p.m. Sundays on KCSM.

"The New Orleans Jazz Club of Northern California - and that's just one of many in the state - has been lamenting the declining membership for the past 25 years," Hadlock, 84, says. "Indeed, they're getting older, more feeble and they don't dance as well as they used to. That's true, but there is kind of a revival of interest in other ways that are reflected by Wynton Marsalis being eager to tout Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet."

He also notes that Berkeley guitarist John Schott, who has "played with John Zorn and all those really wild guys," includes Jelly Roll Morton numbers in his repertoire and has "hired me several times to play old W.C. Handy tunes and stuff like that."

Allen feels that people come to see him play not out of any particular interest in his music but because of his celebrity. "I'm surrounded by good musicians, but I'm not very good," he says. "If I had to make a living as a musician, I'd starve instantly. I do it strictly for amusement, like a weekend tennis player. I'm always amazed that people turn out to hear us."

Davis and Allen first jammed in the early '60s when Allen was working as a standup comedian at Mr. Kelly's in Chicago. The banjo player visits Allen most Thursdays and Fridays to go over new tunes or refresh old ones for the band to play at Cafe Carlyle.

A million tunes

"He knows a million tunes," Davis says of his friend. "If we do 19 shows in 21 days, he'll never repeat a tune during the whole 19 concerts. On the bandstand, he calls up the tunes. We just play 'em on the spot 'cause we have no arrangements and the band doesn't rehearse. He wants it to be that way. He says, 'When I make movies, I go over and over and over. I hate that, but when I play, I want the notes to go out the end of the horn and that's all there is to it.' " {sbox}

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